you're a tiny thing in the palm of my hand
by paper piper
Summary: shiver and burn, sarah. shiver and burn- sarah/jareth


A/N: dark-ish, for me. sigh, i wish i could write more humor, but angst is what i do best, methinks.

A/N: if i owned jareth, i'd make him shiver and die for me.

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you're a tiny thing in the palm of my hand

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_Ding. Dong. Ding. Dong. Dong. Dong._

The clock chimed. It was the height of drama, the climax of a moment, of a lifetime, of the ages—he was desperate. And the clock still chimed, little bits of the world, both fey and natural, falling together, out of each other, melting and re-forming, and he at its center, holding everything in his hand.

Jareth was looking at her.

"Just fear me, love me, do as I say," he said. The words were both a command and a plea. Her blood sang, and Sarah clenched and unclenched her hands.

_Oh god oh god oh god_—what if

_Oh_, but you're just a broken thing, aren't you? And you want me to weep and shiver and die for you, but how can I?

She thought these things, but when he finally dropped his eyes and she had bested him—oh, Sarah knew something was dreadfully wrong.

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But she was just so _young_. So frightfully young, young and silly and terrible. She'd cry and scream at him, throw tantrums and cry, "It's not fair!" He would cross his arms at her, frown at her, disapprove of her. How childish, he'd think. How small of you.

Oh, if he had to see her like that—

No. It doesn't matter anyway.

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He said she could be cruel, oh, but so could he.

Jareth could make her tumble and fall—leap right across hot stones for him with the tilt of his head, the glare in his eyes. He made her sweat, and cry, and shiver, and die—

"You have no power over me" was just a farce. Merely words to fill the spaces. The spell that could send her home, because there was no place like home. Because he dressed like an angel of light, with wings sliding out of the darkness as he crawls toward her, with eyes too needy, too strained, _too much for a child to bear._

"Sarah"—when he speaks her name, it is cruel. He knows that she's staring at him now, from her bedroom at home, eyes trained hard on the window. Though she's listening for the light flutter of wings against glass, and she wants to hear the chirp of the owl and then—_yes_—"Love me, fear me, do as I say"—

But she sits at home, alone.

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He had a face like the moon and eyes like the forest.

She remembered him vividly, when she was alone. And Sarah was always alone, now. She knew he was no dream, nothing she could have thought up on her own—she felt his realness in every ounce of her being, could still feel herself pressed against him in an intimate dance—

Tall and lean, a little sliver of a man, really, and _pale_. She could tell, when she laid eyes on him, that he was not of her kind. A fey, dressed in silks and stars, as if the cosmos itself had birthed him. And _oh_, when he touched her with those eyes—he could not simply look, he reached out toward her from his spirit, and _touched_—she thought she had entered some new space, between the earthly and the divine.

What would it be like, to touch him? To place her own small fingers on that moon-face, over those pale lips, into those wisps of fine blonde hair? Would she shudder and crack, _break_, under the force of touching him, as a tree bends to lightning's strike?

And she's sweaty and trembling again, a child in the face of desire too soon, and not soon enough.

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He sang to her, in her dreams.

Little snippets of lyrics, as if merely a voice caught on the wind, moving through frames behind her eyelids. Everything is dark in her dreams, now. No brilliant scenes of far off lands and adventures, no tales of heroines and romance, no color, no light, no motion.

But only, _I'll place the moon within your heart._

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God, she was exhausted.

Sweaty and even more foul-tempered these days, barking at her parents, slamming her locker, grumbling under her breath wherever she goes. Too frustrated to care that her hair is not lying flat, or that her shirt is wrinkly; in the mirror, she is baggy-eyed and pale. In person, she is limp and lifeless. She looks like a mess.

"My, Sarah, you're a fright," his voice taunts her in the back of her mind. Of course, Jareth is perfectly put-together: the picture of fey magnificence.

She flares and rises, a flame twisting in its place. She wants to answer, make some retort, _remind him who she is_, but he's not really there. It's only her, only her.

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He was her cage—her sugar-sour, leather-legged, Goblin-fey-creature cage. He sat alone nights on his throne at the center of the Labyrinth, ruling with a firm hand, but he was still her cage. She could feel herself beating at the walls of his ribcage, knocking on every bone and screaming, screaming till her voice went hoarse. Though she had left the physical maze, she was still irrevocably bound to him, beyond what her simple answer of "yes" could have done back then. She was locked inside of him, tucked away in his heart like a tender wish, and it was eating her alive.

_I can't live within you._

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fin.

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A/N: eh? eh? i really don't know about this one. review for me, guys :)


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